A Glimpse of Beauty

​​Time raised me to adore you forever,
but see how you wheedle your way to me.
I eat your hair for my breakfast,
crunch on your eyes for my lunch
and chew your body for my dinner.
Time cooked your bum like potatoes,
and sprayed them with a tube of ketchup.
I suck my tongue before pouncing on them.
From the crown of my hair to my toes,
from the tip of my nose to my twin lips,
from the pit of my stomach to my fingers,
I am a crazy epitome, insane, thumped down.
I swallow the hog of long and short nails,
now, irons fill my stomach like a rock;
I eat sand and pebbles crack me up;
I swallow rocks like a volcano
and now I speak the tongue of mountains
even valleys sprout in me like a forest,.
What is my offence apart from loving you?
It's the craziness of our era that I should be mad
as the side effects of being deep in love,
a man swooping down to guzzle leaves,
as soon as they fall off their mother trees,
a basin of broken bottles and brass,
and a sucker of shards of gruesome glasses,
pins and pointed needles wrestle in me,
filling me, slicing me, oh the glory of it!
like a valley for dumping factory waste
I swallow them all without a vomit.
No doubt, you’re a woman of a round face,
with a huge chest like an umbrella roof,
brown and curly hair, soft and liquid lips,
whose eyes scream like car lights at night.
Yet, I don’t see the beauty of those things
that do not consume me but what I embezzle,
a lion, a tiger, standing in my doorframe.
Those who see me say that I’m a miracle
to survive the silent stitches and internal bleeding,
or for having no grisly bleeding at all.
Rejoice, my dear, rejoice in this season,
It’s great you’re a body and I’m your choice.

​Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah's bio: I​ have been featured in Propel Magazine, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets, Atticus Review, Tab: The Magazine of Poetry and Poetics, The Silk Literary Magazine Sublimation and elsewhere. I won The Alexander Pope Poetry Award for The Pierian in 2023 and the Unleash Creatives’ Editor’s Choice Prize in Poetry in 2024, the Editor’s Choice of Panoply Zine in 2024, the Second Poetry Prize Winner of Streetlight Literary Magazine in 2024. I was shortlisted for the Minds Shine Bright Poetry Prize in 2024. My poetry collection, I Blame My Ancestors published by Kingsman Quarterly in 2024, was the Second Runner-up at the Kingsman Quarterly Poetry Slam in 2024.